Amazon.com Review
Lila Moscowitz, the Jewish-American heroine of Binnie Kirshenbaum's novel
Pure Poetry, is a witty mess. She lies her head off, bribes little kids with candy, writes smutty poems in highly rigid forms, and advises students in her poetry class not to read books. She overdramatizes everything that happens to her, avoids her true feelings, and whips up a frenzy of neuroses at the drop of a zipper. In other words, she's like most people you know.
As her 35th birthday approaches, Lila begins to miss her ex-husband, a German cartographer whose parents were Nazis (Albert Speer was his uncle). What she misses most about Max is the great sex, which was unpredictable and ferociously exciting--especially rousing because of rassenschande, or the taboo mingling of the races. This makes her new relationship with blue-blooded Henry seem all the more stifling. She's getting tired of Henry's fastidiously protective attitude toward his silverware and soup tureens, not to mention his contention "that he does not have fantasies, that he is perfectly content with average sex, whatever that is." But she tries to stay with him, because at a certain age the bohemian lifestyle turns into something irresponsible, even pathetic, particularly in New York City. Lila herself understands that this is the source of her irony: "I mock feelings," she says blithely. "I make jokes to deflect the sorry truths about myself, and I use snide comments to camouflage hurt, and I'm good at it."
Lila wants to live freely in a world that favors discipline and orderly existence, especially for women approaching the end of their childbearing years. Her quest to balance freedom and form, or freedom within form, plays out metaphorically in Pure Poetry's structure: each chapter is headed by a definition of a poetic term that is somehow related ("fabliau" before a sex scene, "elegy" before a funeral, and so on). Certain readers might appreciate Kirshenbaum's attempt to impose some order on her narrative. The rest of us can race past these epigraphs (they're short) in favor of the narrative itself--wild, silly, and uncompromisingly fun, it's no more grown-up than Lila. --John Ponyicsanyi
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Poet and femme fatale Lila Moscowitz is in top form, and at rock bottom, in Kirshenbaum's relentlessly sassy tale of a beautiful 34-year-old Jewish woman on a quest for love and happiness. Lila is a minor New York celebrity, famous for her bawdy yet formally rigorous sonnets, but her success as a writer can't compensate for the fact that she pines for her ex-husband, German cartographer Max Schirmer, while feigning interest in her current blue-blooded boyfriend, Henry. Having sabotaged her marriage to Max in part because she felt she'd betrayed her Jewish heritage by marrying a German, Lila cracks many tepid, transparent jokes about loving the enemy in an attempt to mask her enduring passion for him. Another truth she hides from is that her passion for and dependence on Max threatened her sense of self. Lila's fear of trusting people is rooted predictably in her unsatisfactory family relationships, which Kirshenbaum describes in heavyhanded fashion. Lila's parents barely acknowledge her existence, though her mother, Bella, is as domineering as she is dismissive of her daughter. When Bella dies, Lila is not even informed of the funeral and, in an unconvincing scene, is kicked out of the house where the family is sitting shiva. Other plot twists, details and supporting characters are equally ineffectual: Lila wants to be 32 again, so she enlists her best friend Carmen to help her turn back time; Lila's apartment is haunted by two ghosts, her therapist is a cross-dresser and Henry keeps his parents' ashes in shoeboxes. The cast of characters make a sketchy backdrop for Lila's ongoing monologue about her search for happiness, but the heroine's path is obstructed by so many self-consciously irreverent jokes and cliched observations that she doesn't generate sympathy until the end of the book. Here, however, some of Lila's quandaries achieve resolution, and her journey seems worth it when her emotional complexity shines through her defensive wisecracking.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
